Riddles in the Flesh

The papaya sat on the counter, its skin mottled with yellow like something forgotten. Elena had bought it three days ago, back when she still thought their marriage could be saved. Now she watched it soften into rot, a perfect metaphor.

'You're being a bull in a china shop,' Marcus had said last night, his voice low and careful, like he was reciting lines he'd practiced. He always used that tone when delivering verdicts he'd already rehearsed in his head.

She'd laughed. Actually laughed. The sound startled them both.

Elena laced her running shoes—her escape ritual, five miles every morning regardless of the weather or the state of her marriage. The pavement was cold. Her breath fogged the air as she moved through the sleeping neighborhood, past the baseball field where teenage boys practiced in the summer, their shouts carrying over the fences like echoes of a life she'd never really had.

Marcus wanted children. She wasn't sure she wanted anything at all anymore.

The Great Sphinx had posed its riddle to Oedipus: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? The answer was man. But Elena sometimes thought the real riddle wasn't about legs or aging—it was about how you could share a bed with someone for seven years and still not know who they were when they woke up.

She slowed to a walk somewhere near the old quarry. Her phone buzzed. Marcus.

'Come home,' his text read. 'We need to talk.'

She stared at the words until they blurred. There was something sphinx-like about him these days—inscrutable, posed with questions that had no right answers. Or maybe she was the one who'd become impossible to read.

The papaya would be mush by now.

Elena turned around and started running back.